The Parts Men Play eBook

At the conclusion of the letter he put it down, and
crossing to the French windows, leaned against them,
while his fingers drummed nervously on the glass.
With a gesture of impatience, as though he resented
its having been written at all, he picked up the letter
once more, and turning the pages, quickly reached
the part which had affected him so:

’They tell me I’m going to lose my arm,
and that I’m out of it; but they’re wrong.
I’m going back to America just as soon as they
will let me, and I’m going to tell them at home
what this war is about. And, what’s more,
I’m going to tell them what war is. It
isn’t great armies moving wonderfully forward
“as if on parade,” as some of these newspaper
fellows tell you. It’s a putrid, rotten
business. After Loos dead men and horses rotted
for days in the sun. War’s not a thing
of glory; it’s rats and vermin and filth and
murder. Three weeks ago I killed a German.
He hadn’t a chance to get his gun up before
I stuck him with my bayonet like a pig. As he
fell his helmet rolled off; he was about eighteen,
with sort of golden hair, and light, light blue eyes.
I’ve been through some hell, Austin, but when
I saw his face I cried like a kid. To you that’s
another argument for our remaining neutral.
To me that poor little Fritzie is the very reason America
should have been in it from the first. Can’t
you see that this Prussian outfit is not only murdering
Frenchmen and Russians and Britishers, but is murdering
her own men as well? If America had been in
the war it would have been over now, and every day
she holds back means so many more of the best men
in the world dead.

’For the love of Mike, Austin, clear your brains.
I have seen your stuff in American papers sent over
to me, and it’s vile rot. Tomorrow they’re
going to take my left arm from me, but’——­

Selwyn crumpled the letter in his hand and hurled
it into the fireplace. Plunging his hands into
his pockets, he paced the room as he had done that
night when Watson had called to tell him he was going
to enlist. He was seized with an incoherent fury
at it all—­the inhumanity of it—­the
degradation of the whole thing. But through the
formless cloud of his thoughts there gleamed the one
incessant phrase ‘about eighteen, with sort
of golden hair, and light, light blue eyes.’
Why should that groove his consciousness so deeply?
He had heard, unmoved, of the death of Malcolm Durwent.
A month ago he had read how Captain Fensome, of Lady
Durwent’s house-party, had been killed trying
to rescue his servant in No Man’s Land.
The sight of Dick Durwent and Johnston Smyth marching
away had been only a spur to more intensive writing.
Then why should that haltingly worded sentence lie
like ice against his heart?

A sharp pain shot through his head.

Stopping his walk, he leaned once more against the
windows, and rested his hot face on the grateful coolness
of the glass.